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Have you ever found yourself with all of your bills paid, almost no money left over and two weeks to go before you get your next paycheck? If you have been in this situation, you know how frustrating it can be. You're responsible, but now you get to suffer for it.

When you get your next check, it's a whole different story. All or most of your bills were paid two weeks ago, so the money you just got is all yours! It's time to live it up and spend! Right?

It could be, unless you don't want to return to the first half of the cycle again, the one where you end up eating ramen for two weeks after two weeks of fillet mignon.

What if you could have a balance between these two extremes between every paycheck? Instead of your own personal boom and bust cycles, how about a nice, steady and relaxing cruise, so to speak? Many of you are probably thinking, "sure, right after I get a huge raise!" That would help quite a bit, but that's not what I'm talking about. You can do this with the money you have right now.

You'll need a few things first:

1. Open an online high yield savings account linked to your checking account. There are many options out there for this, but whichever one you go with, it must allow you to automate withdrawals. Personally, I use ING Direct.

2. Some sort of budgeting software or a spreadsheet.

The first and hardest part of this is getting your online savings account set up. You could do this with an ordinary brick and mortar bank savings account, but that would likely lack two useful features: a relatively high rate of interest and the ability to automate some transactions (why this is important will be explained later).

Once your account is up and running and the link to your checking account is established, sit down with your spreadsheet or budgeting software (such as Quicken) and begin noting recurrent expenses. Typically, these will include things like rent, cell phone service, utilities, etc. You should not only look at monthly expenses, however, but also regularly occurring expenses that come up over longer intervals, such as car oil changes.

Once you have these expenses listed, divide them by 2 if they are monthly, 4 if they are bimonthly, 6 if they are quarterly, etc. The reason for these divisors is paychecks: most people will get two a month, so if you're working with something like a car oil change that typically happens every three months, you collect six paychecks during the interim.

The idea here is to establish an averaged amount that can be

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